The Countdown (Kendra)

I said goodbye to my 3 year old flip phone and bought an iphone on December 29, 2012.  I was excited to have a smartphone and especially to have a camera handy at all times.  I didn't take a million pictures right away, mostly I forgot that I could and had to actively remember that I had a camera.  So, there are only about 30 pictures and videos on my phone before Magnolia's death.

But they comprise a slow motion countdown of sorts.  This whole month we have been obsessed with what we were doing last year.  We look on the calendar, piece together our memories of weekends trying hard to figure out what happened on each day.  We have been really desperate to remember all of those last weeks and days with Magnolia--often writing down what we remember and revising the calendar to include new memories.

Part of it is not wanting to lose anything, which we have struggled with all year.  Sharing memories around the house, consulting the 2012 calendar to see what we were doing the year before, writing down memories, looking through old pictures and trying to recreate what our family felt like before has become a regular part of life around here.  However, the desperation we feel about it this month has so much to do with the end of "last year with Magnolia."

After the 26th of January there will be no more memories of what was happening with Magnolia last year.  The memories will be about the day of her death, preparations for her memorials, the surreal plane ride to Denver without a squirming toddler on my lap, and the long slog through numbness, shock, pain, sadness and slow realization that dominated the beginning of 2013. 

The countdown feels very real to us and Sasha and I are both dreading the one year anniversary and the threshold into another part of our life without Magnolia.  This makes the pictures and videos on my phone feel so precious.  They document the last days of our life as a family of four, the last days of "before" when we knew how nice our life was and were so sure we were lucky and blessed in a million ways.  When we were still so naively happy.

So here is the countdown of memories and images stored on my phone:

December 31, 2012:  D has a lovely little porcelain tea set that Magnolia was beginning to be interested in (very aggressively, interested). D was worried about it being broken, so she sent it to the basement for semi-permanent storage. So last year for Christmas, we got both girls a tin tea set that they really loved. Magnolia spent a bunch of time loading the tray and carrying it all over grandmas house giving tea to anyone who would take it. We celebrated New Year's Eve with Ruth Hart (who loves tea) and D and M had their first "real" tea party with their new set. (The box with the new tea set and other Christmas gifts took a week to mail from Denver, then sat at our school for a couple of weeks before we finally brought it home...after Magnolia's death. So this also turns out to be the last time she played with her new tea set. Procrastination and a sudden, unexpected death were not allies in this case.)

January 9, 2013: D was especially excited about regular access to video and created many reasons to be recorded. These often included props, costumes and special lighting. M really enjoyed these filming events, but D would ask for one of us to take her away for the filming so she wouldn't "mess everything up." So almost every video of D in January of last year looks and sounds like this--D happily performing while M howls and screams in the background because she has been removed from the premises. This common sibling scenario was just beginning to happen regularly and would have continued for some time. Poor M just wanted so badly to be cool like her sister! 

January 12, 2013:  At the beginning of last year we were preparing to renovate our basement, which meant moving everything out of the basement. We hired the ever wonderful Sarah Whitney to take care of the kids for 2 saturdays so that we could clean out the basement.  The first weekend they went to the American Museum of Natural History with her cousin Diana and sent us these pictures from their adventure.  

January 14, 2013:  The girls were sitting on a stool in the kitchen watching something bake in the oven. The picture is fuzzy and in another world it would get lost among better pictures of the two of them together. But, it is the last picture we have of our two wonderful sisters together. I love how Magnolia is holding Delphinium and how smiley they both are. They had developed a strong bond and they showed us so often how much they really loved each other. 

 

January 15, 2013:  On this day a year ago we took our dog, Calliope, to the vet and had her euthanized. She had been living with a tumor for over three years and her health declined suddenly. We came home on this day and found her curled up in the bathroom with a swollen belly. We had been talking to D for awhile about Calliope's health and how we thought it was getting close to time for us to euthanize her. We explained what that was and talked about what it meant to be dead. We read children's books about the deaths of family pets and she cried and said she would miss Calliope and didn't want her to die.
Our neighbors took care of D and M while Sasha and I took Calliope to the vet, where we cried and stroked her fur and told her what a good girl she was and how we loved her while the vet administered the chemicals. We sat with her for a long time and then went home without her, feeling really awful.
Sasha and I often say it was Calliope's last great gift to us that she died that week. A little over a week later I was sitting in our bedroom holding D on my lap explaining that Magnolia was dead. In that moment I was so grateful that I didn't have to explain what death was, that in her 5 year old way she already knew what it meant to be dead. Calliope's death got lost in the events of last January, but we miss her too and are grateful that she helped prepare our family (and especially D) a little bit for Magnolia's death.
We took these pictures before we took Calliope to the vet. The girls were saying goodbye.

And this is a picture of them having dinner with our neighbors that night:

January 19, 2013:  Sarah returned for another Saturday of kid care and went to the zoo with D and M.  She took this video of Magnolia late that afternoon.  Magnolia was 22 month old when she died and was just beginning to put words together into phrases and short sentences. Unfortunately, we have very few videos with her saying very much. I love all the language in this video. Words we had never heard her say and combinations of words that show so clearly where she was developmentally with her language: "open door", "moo dis", "it huby". We only wish it went on forever.

January 23, 2013:  Last year on this day I was home with Magnolia and realized she had never painted. It was a moment of second-child revelation. D had been painting and glueing and making marks on paper for almost a year when she was Magnolia's age, basically since she was coordinated enough to handle each material. It was no great travesty, but I felt bad. So we got out the paints and she painted for over an hour! 
It was everything I love about watching kids discover a new material: exploration, choice-making, thoughtful consideration, new discoveries and always questions. It is why I love my job as an art teacher so much. I am so grateful that we had that morning of painting together and for the wonderful paintings that remind me of that experience. 
I posted a picture of her painting that day on Facebook, smiling and proudly holding her paint brush. Like so many memories and pictures from these last weeks it feels so impossibly incongruous with the post 4 days later announcing her death.

January 26, 2013:  Sasha and I had been out on a daytime date to Queens.  We had brunch and went to an art exhibit, talking alot about the girls and plans that we had for the near and far future with them.  We returned in the early evening and Sasha did dinner time with them while I went to our bedroom to get some schoolwork done.  After dinner, D was amusing herself singing a song she was making up, dancing around the living room.  M had climbed into the chair near the bookcase with some board books and was reading to herself.  Sasha took this video of her reading "Down By the Bay" saying the words at the end of each phrase.  A little while later he took her up to bed.  This is the last captured image we have of her alive.  We love her cat ears and her happily reading to herself with another book ready to go right next to her.  

The countdown ends here.  And then all the pictures are from "after" when she was already gone and our family suddenly felt so wrong.